Unspeakable Horror!

Beware the White Blob! 

Back in 1988, when I was 15, I rode my bicycle over to the local multiplex theater and saw a horror remake called The Blob.  I was so disturbed by what I saw there that I had to walk out of the theater halfway through the movie, and then I had to ride my bicycle home in the dark, so it's no wonder that I've always considered a blob to be a horrifying and formidable monster, not just the campy monster from the 1958 flick.   When I was trying to find an enemy for Bartholomew to vanquish, the blob emerged from deep within my consciousness, inspired by that horrifying theatrical spectacle from 1988.

In the first stories that I wrote about my blob, the blob was a deep tar-like black, marbled with bright red splotches.  Unlike the cinematic predecessors from 1958 and 1988, my blob was not a mindless mass of amoebic hunger that consumed everything in sight.  My blob had a very developed brain deep inside its amorphous mass (in fact, it had many brains), and it was super-intelligent with ambitions for assimilating the human race, so strategy and secrecy became necessities for my blob (see my story "The Master Blob" at the Bartholomew website).  Basically, the blob would enter a victim's bloodstream, take over their mind, and then ultimately the host's body would melt into a nasty attack blob that would re-join the mass of its master (after partaking of a few screaming teenagers).  A master blob with an evil plan and many minions seemed much scarier to me.  

A few years ago, after I had already written several stories about this black-and-red master blob, I was trying to come up with a new kind of vampire/monster for a different story, and I thought of a parasite that lived on the surface of the skin and covered its host's hands and face, turning the host into some kind of zombie/vampire with white skin, and I named these zombie-like creatures the Marshmallow People.  Next, I made the white skin vampiric, giving it the ability to draw blood from a victim with just a touch.  I thought it was a horrifying idea: someone with white, alien skin trying to grab your throat to draw out the blood and feed on you.

I was writing the second draft of the Bartholomew comic book script when it occurred to me to combine the two monsters together.  As soon as I imagined a white blob rising up from the abyss at the bottom of the sea, I knew it would give me a chance to pay homage to two of my favorite monsters, the blob and the great white whale, Moby-Dick.  There is an unforgettable chapter in Moby-Dick where Melville goes into great philosophical depth about why white is the scariest color, and I knew this would apply perfectly to my new monster: the White Blob.  

Since then, the White Blob has evolved into a super-intelligent organism with a very complex life-cycle.  I've always been very impressed by a monster with a complex life-cycle (see Slither for a great example).  For me, the White Blob combines the most horrifying film experience of my childhood (the 1988 Blob) with my most gratifying literary experience (Moby-Dick -- can you tell I was an English Major!).  The White Blob is part blob, part Moby-Dick, and part Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  Beware the White Blob!  Check out "Bartholomew of the Scissors dot com" for more about my most monstrous creation!